


Saturday With Dad

by sidana



Series: The Peter Black Stories [7]
Category: Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter - Laurell K. Hamilton
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-03
Updated: 2020-02-03
Packaged: 2021-02-27 18:34:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22550329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sidana/pseuds/sidana
Summary: A lot of people misjudge Becca Parnell because of her sunny nature. Sometimes even her own family misses her more serious side.
Series: The Peter Black Stories [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1154201
Kudos: 7





	Saturday With Dad

Saturday With Dad

Disclaimer- not my characters, not my universe, I’ll put everyone back where I found them when I’m done playing with them.

Time frame- post-Serpentine

This is a side story in my alternate Peter timeline but doesn’t require reading the previous stories in the series.

***

Becca woke up at six like she usually did on Saturday mornings even though she had no particular reason to do so. Her dance studio made everyone take a week off twice a year to let all those nagging little injuries heal up better and while most of her brain was well aware of that, the message apparently hadn’t gotten as far as her internal clock that still insisted it was time to get moving and get ready. So since she knew she wasn’t going to be able to get back to sleep, she made her was down to the kitchen where Dad and Peter were already getting breakfast going.

“Pancakes are coming up. What would you like, button?” Dad asked as he moved among pans on the stove while Peter sat at the kitchen table, phone in one hand and a Red Bull in the other.

“One pancake, two slices of bacon, please,” she said, going to the fridge to pull out a gallon of milk and a large container of cut fruit. By the time she had poured herself a glass and had put the milk back in the fridge, Dad had a plate set up for her. She dumped a bunch of the fruit on top of the pancake since, unlike syrup, it had nutritional value, returned the rest to its cool spot and settled down next to Peter to eat.

“So what would you like to do today?” Dad asked as he put a fuller plate in front of Peter, who grunted a vague ‘thanks’ in return.

“I don’t know,” she said. It was kind of weird to not have something on her schedule on Saturday morning. “What would you guys be doing today after dropping me at dance class if I was going to the studio?”

“We had planned on starting out by going over to the range. It’s not something you’ve been interested before. Are you interested in it now?” Dad said. She looked up at him and saw him going a little into cop face, like she was one of his puzzles he was trying to figure out the answer for. She had never though of target shooting as something that could be fun when she thought about guns at all, but they were also something that was just present in her life.

“You know how you and Mom make me take that gun safety class every year?”

“Yes,” Dad said as he finished up the pancakes and bacon and turned off the stove. She saw Peter’s eyes flick between her and Dad even though he was trying to seem like he was still on his phone.

“Last time, it was pretty clearly for littler kids, even though they didn’t quite break out the Eddie the Eagle coloring books,” she said, trying not to roll her eyes too much because that might make Dad take her point less seriously. “So if I go with you today, can I skip that class this year?”

“I’ll have to talk to your mother,” Dad said. He moved out of the kitchen and toward their bedroom.She worked her way through the bacon and a bunch of the strawberries and blueberries as Peter worked to demolish his big stack of pancakes.

“Mom’s not exactly happy about the concept, but she understands why it might be a good idea,” Peter mumbled around a mouthful of food. His hearing was better than hers was these days.

“Things are set with your mother,” Dad said as he returned a few minutes later. “We just need to pick up a few things over at my house on the way to the range. You’ve got small hands and I need to get you a weapon that you can hold more comfortably.”

“Okay,” she said. Dad kept a lot of things over at his old house. There were people who had asked her why he hadn’t sold it after the wedding, but really, if they wanted to know that Mom didn’t want Dad keeping the flame thrower in her house, then they could ask Mom or Dad directly about it.

“Now you go get dressed while Peter and I clean up and we can hit the road,” Dad said as Peter put his phone down with a snort.

What did you wear to go target shoot? She wondered as she went back into her room. She flipped briefly through her dresser and closet, though about what Peter usually wore for that and settled on a pink and purple plaid shirt and grey jeggings. She quickly pulled her hair back into a secure french braid, figuring that it was always a good idea to keep hair from falling in your face when you were doing something active, applied a little lip balm, and then headed back into the kitchen feeling a little unsure of just what she had signed herself up for.

***

After the stop where Dad came out of his house with one of those heavy plastic carrying cases, they made it to the foyer of the gun range, the guys carrying the case and a larger duffle bag. Dad and Peter talked a little with the guy at the desk in a way that made it clear to her they were regulars there before introducing her to him.

“Before we go any further, button. Do you see the list of rules on the wall there?”

“Yes.”

“This is the gun safety part of the morning,” Dad said, going back into a quiet cop voice. “You’re going to read each of them out loud to me and explain what you think they mean and then we’ll talk about what you got right and whether you have any questions about what they mean.”

They spent a good amount of time going through the rules list as Peter put the duffle down to check his phone and the guy at the desk checked in another customer. 

“And now inward we go,” Peter said, picking his bag up again as he tucked his phone in a pocket. 

After a short hallway with a few vending machines and signs for a single common restroom and a fire exit, they came into the range proper, which ended up being a long room with stalls showing shooting lanes on the near side of it and targets on the wall on the far side.

“Are we hot?” Dad asked as he pushed through a heavy door.

“I’m still loading,” the man who had come in while she was reading rules said. “Is this your daughter, Ted? She looks like Peter.”

“She is,” Dad said. “Becca, thisis Seth Cooper, Seth this is Becca Parnell-Forrester.”

“Good to meet you,” she said, automatically offering a hand to shake as Seth put the hand gun he had been loading down and stuck his own right hand out to grip hers.

“Ted’s said a lot of good things about you,” Seth said.

“It’s always neat to meet more of Dad’s friends,” she said. Seth let go of her hand and went back to going over his weapon.

Peter put the duffel bag down in one of the other stalls, and Dad placed the plastic case on a bench and opened it up.

“This gun is called a Firestar,” Dad said, removing it from the case. “What’s the first rule?”

“Always assume it’s loaded and can hurt someone. Is that like one that Aunt Anita uses?”

“It is.” He sounded happy at her question. Dad liked it when she noticed things that he said most people would miss. “It’s a small gun and she uses it as a second weapon. This is actually a spare I keep for her but I brought it out for you to use because it’s easier for someone with hands your size to hold.”

“You know they make a version in pink,” Seth said He was probably trying to be nice to her but it came out as kind of condescending.

“Pink is awesome, you know. Not only is is a great color just because, but you know how my Mom has her own shop? She’s got a toolbox so she can put together displays and shelves and stuff. All the tools in it are pink. She says that way it guarantees that one of the guys in the other shops on the street borrow her tools, they always give it back because they think a pink hammer or screwdriver has girl cooties on it or something.” Peter chuckled as Seth gave her a look like he was suddenly not quite sure what to make of her so she figured it might be good to change the subject. “What do you use, Peter?”

“A Browning,” he said. “I don’t like Firestars.”

It was kind of a weird thing for him to say so she filed it away in her head for further reference. The way he said it made her think he wouldn’t tell her why if she asked him directly but as Dad liked to say, people often gave away a lot of answers if you just knew the right way to pay attention to what they said and how they acted.But instead of giving her clues now, he pulled several pairs of puffy headphones out of the duffle and passed one set to her.

‘Um, thanks?”

“It gets loud in an enclosed space.” he said.

“And I’d get in trouble with your mother if you came back with your hearing messed up,” Dad said. She put them around her neck like Peter and Dad did, noticing Seth had pulled his own headphones out.“There are also safety glasses, which you brother needs to put on.”

“Hey, I’m getting there,” Peter said in a way that showed he thought Dad was nagging him.

“Set a good example for your sister,” Dad said, passing her some clear glasses that seemed pretty sturdy.

Dad stepped to the side of the room and returned with a paper target with the shape of a person on it, reaching up for some type of wire and pulley thing at the top of the stall and fastening it to the wire. Using the pulley, he wheeled it to the back of the range.

“Now here comes the hard part of the talk. I expect you’re going to do some thinking about it later, and if you want to talk, we can talk about it as much as you like. You need to know that it’s not like the movies and tv shows. In real life, there’s no such thing as shooting s gun out of someone’s hand or shooting to wound. You only fire a weapon outside of training if you think it’s a situation where you shoot to kill.” He was trying to keep his voice soft, but there was no way of really hiding how he was entirely in federal marshal mode as he said that.

“Okay,” she said, feeling like suddenly everything had gotten a lot more serious than she had expected.

“Part of my being so serious here is that it’s part of learning how to respect what a gun to do. But part of it’d also because of who you are. I know you, button. I can’t see you growing up to be a cop or going into the military, and I know what you think of hunting,” he said as she wrinkled up her nose. You should only hunt if you were going to eat the animal you killed and every time one of mom’s friends had tried to get her to try venison or elk they’d brought over to the house, she’d thought it was nasty, no matter how well-prepared they’d tried to claim it was. “So I think the only time you’d ever pick up a gun outside the range was if something really, really bad was happening and there weren’t very many good choices about how to try to get safe again.”

“That makes sense,” she said. She felt like she was stepping back from a cliff at that.

He showed her how to load the Firestar.

“Now the ear protection goes on when someone says the word commence. You can take them off when someone says stop.”

“And you can only fire in the time between someone says commence and when they say stop,” she said, paraphrasing what had been on the rules list.

“Correct. The first time, we’re going to hold the gun together so you’ll know what it feel like and how the gun moves when you shoot. Then the second time, you’ll load and try on your own. Are you ready?”

“I guess so.”

“Commence,” Seth said.

As she put her headphones on, Dad wrapped his arms around her from the back. She heard either Seth or Peter start to fire from their own stalls as Dad pressed the gun into her hands.

“You want the finger from your dominant hand to go around the trigger and then you put your other hand underneath the gun to support it. It take a lot of energy for a bullet to fire, so the gun is going to jump more than you’d expect it to. Are you ready?”

“Then this is how we aim for the center of the target,” he said positioning her arms and the gun very precisely as he explained a little more on hoe to aim. “And fire when you’re ready.”

She pulled down on the trigger, feeling the weapon jump just like Dad has said. They went through the rest of the bullets, Dad readjusting their hand and arm position just so every time.

“Stop,” she heard Peter’s muffled voice to the side of her.

“We’re going to put the gun down on the ledge there and see how we’ve done,” Dad said. As she did that, he was wheeling the target back toward them. As it approached them, she saw the bullet holes clustered very neatly the middle of the target.

“That’s good,” she said.

“Let’s have you load up and I’ll swap out the target and you can try on her own then.”

She followed Dad’s instructions, waited for someone to call to ‘Commence’ and began to fire. Even though she tried to the her time and follow Dad’s instructions exactly, it did not go well at all and she only managed to hit the target at all twice on the first round, much less get anything in the rings. The following rounds got a little better with Dad’s help even though she was still nowhere close to hitting anything in the center of the target.

It turned out that shooting was another one of those things where you had to concentrate hard enough in order to get it right that it was easy to lose track of time and it was almost a surprise when they said good-bye to Seth and packed up to leave.

“Would you like to get some ice cream now?” Dad asked as they loaded the SUV up in the parking lot.

“Can we go to the gelato place next to the dog bakery? They’ve got the best dulce de leche flavor there,” she said. It was good enough that it only took a kiddie cup from there to make you feel really happy. The nutritionist that came into talk to the dancers liked to say making smart decisions about food now meant that you shouldn’t have to diet for weight loss later.

“We can do that,” Dad said.

“Can we bring along Becca every time then?” Peter said. “When it’s just me and Ted, it’s always the gym after shooting and never ice cream.”

“Would you like to come with us again?” Dad said. “It’s the kind of thing that has to be entirely your choice either way.”

She took a deep centering breath as she tried to collect her thoughts. Dad liked to say that unless you saw something on fire, it was usually good to really think a hard question through before giving an answer.While she didn’t hate guns, she didn’t particularly like them either. But she didn’t get come from a normal family. Instead, she came from a family where weird stuff happened. Peter liked to say that the way the world would discover that the North American Griffin wasn’t actually extinct was when one of them tried to eat Mom. As bad as that was, she had thought it was both kind of funny and kind of true.

The father she had never known had died trying to protect her. Dad had nearly died protecting her. Peter could have died trying to protect her feelings, which was all kinds of wrong. One of her friends had a t-shirt that had ‘Self-Rescuing Princess’ on it and that phrase kept coming back to her mind in response to Dad’s question.

“I did really bad today. I think I hit one of Peter’s targets at one point. Maybe it would be good to come back some more times so that if something really awful was happening and I was there, I don’t want someone to get hurt because of me. And maybe I could go to that self-defense class once a week with Mom?”

“I’ll talk to her about that, but I think she’ll be good with it,” Dad said. “And if you change your mind, there’s no pressure. You can walk away at any time and it’s fine.”

“This is… I don’t know…” Instead of trying to find the words, she pulled Dad and Peter into a three way hug. She didn’t want them to have to worry about her and even saying that would probably make them worry about her.

“And I’m here for you, button, to help you learn then. I always do my best to be there for you,” Dad said.

“Me too,” Peter said.


End file.
